RIP To Human First Pass Document Review?
Using actual humans to perform an initial review isn't gone yet, but the days are numbered.
Lawyers are still using real, live people to take a first crack at document review, but much like the “I’m not dead yet” guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it’s a job that will be stone dead soon. Because there are a lot of deeply human tasks that AI will struggle to replace, but getting through a first run of documents doesn’t look like one of them.
At last week’s Relativity Fest, the star of the show was obviously Relativity aiR for Review, which the company moved to general availability. In conjunction with the release, Relativity pointed to impressive results the product racked up during the limited availability period including Cimplifi reporting that the product cut review time in half and JND finding a 60 percent cut in costs.
“We’ve used Relativity aiR for Review on multiple live projects with tremendous success,” said Mike Cichy, Regional Manager of Litigation Support at Foley & Lardner LLP. “In one case, we had an extremely tight production deadline; aiR for Review completed the review, which would have taken over 15 people and three weeks of time, in less than one week, all while delivering results that far outperformed what we’ve seen in traditional human review.”
A recurring tale among early users was a belt-and-suspenders approach to first pass review, maintaining a team of human reviewers as a quality assurance measure. It’s a natural response for a terminally overcautious profession, but it’s also one that multiple early adopters said they ultimately would abandon as unnecessary. In fact, more than one said the humans were just… more wrong.
Not released to the general public yet — but coming soon — Relativity also previewed its aiR for Privilege product capable of identifying privileged documents and drafting a consistent, single voice privilege log. Troutman Pepper, already using the limited availability product, anticipates it will cut privilege review time by more than 50 percent. One testimonial provided at the keynote shared that the product correctly found a clutch of hundreds of privileged documents that the human reviewers had missed.
Turning over first pass to the computers isn’t entirely new. We’ve had TAR procedures that could tackle this for some time, but lawyers spent the last decade performatively bad mouthing tech review in the courts. Now, armed with generative AI, attorneys seem to have discovered a new level of trust. Especially senior lawyers who are actually engaging with discovery platforms for the first time.
How long will attorneys keep humans in the loop for their own peace of mind? As Relativity’s CAO/CLO Adam Weiss told me, “the more ubiquitous this technology becomes, the runway gets shortened considerably.” In other words, lawyers won’t let AI take the wheel out of the gate, but the more customers are willing to say “trust us, we did the same thing and you’ll soon realize it’s costly and useless,” it’s going to get harder to justify keeping the human first pass reviewers around.
Which is good news for clients and attorneys trying to do more and higher level work. It’s not particularly great news for folks working as contract attorneys to pick up work on brute force review projects. There’s still a market for alternative legal service providers — collecting and loading up documents remains a skill that outside consultants can perform better and cheaper than a law firm. But anyone out there with a business model reliant on throwing hundreds of bodies at a problem should start rethinking.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
